[Aachen]

I don't understand how this doesn't fit your use case. The tags are for different things, e.g.

> for places where you can get larger amounts of "drinking water" for filling a fresh water holding tank, such as found on caravans, RVs and boats

versus

> a man-made construction providing access to water, supplied by centralized water distribution system (unlike in case of man_made=water_well [...]). The tag man_made=water_tap is used for publicly usable water taps, such as those in the cities and graveyards. Water taps may provide potable and technical water, which can be specified with drinking_water=yes and drinking_water=no.

And another tag for when you're not mapping a separate water point, but indicating whether a given feature has drinking water (for example a well or mountain hut).

You're saying that it's tough when anyone can mess with the data rather than working in a structured way, but these tags have distinct definitions and seem perfectly sensible to me (there are much worse examples like highway=track, which spawned huge discussions in various places within the community). How do these tags not match your use case to select which tags you need and display those in the way you want (e.g. as list or map)?

[francisofascii]

When features are sometimes tagged specifically and other times tagged more generically, it is impossible to get valid results. You either have to filter on the more specific tag (leaving out valid features) or include the generic tagged features (including features that should not be).

[matkoniecz]

In this case it should not be a problem - listing mapped places suitable to get drinking water is quite reasonable here.

[francisofascii]

Not really. Sometimes you specifically want a water fountain where the water shoots upwards. Not a faucet.

[Aachen]

If only we paid people to map everything to the detail you specifically need. I've never seen a public faucet that does what you describe, only in American movies in high schools (so those aren't public and most mappers won't know they're there or, even if, you wouldn't be allowed to use it as a non-student). I'm not sure the tagging scheme is the problem here: even if you'd enforce using the right tag by giving everyone mandatory training and exams so they tag everything perfectly, you'd not get this sort of detail necessarily, at least not without doubling the number of contributors as compared to today. (And that's from a German/Dutch perspective, countries which are already pretty well-mapped. In Belgium you probably need to quadruple the force or more.)

[matkoniecz]

then exclude `man_made=water_tap`

in this case extreme fragmentation of tagging is actually useful